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'Feminist Porn Book' Tops 2013 Best Feminist, Queer Book List

Lila GrayDec 31, 2013 11:00 AM PST

LOS ANGELES — “The Feminist Porn Book” snagged the number one position on girl/girl culture site Autostraddle’s list of Top 10 Queer and Feminist Books of 2013.

“’The Feminist Porn Book’ already feels like it’s been around for years just because it should have been — it fills a hole in contemporary feminist writing so big that I almost feel bad making a joke about filing holes,” Autostraddle NSFW Editor Carolyn wrote.

Co-edited by Tristan Taormino, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, Constance Penley and Mireille Miller-Young, the book features contributions from the best and brightest feminist pornademics and adult performers, including Susie Bright, Candida Royalle, Betty Dodson, Nina Hartley, Dylan Ryan, Jiz Lee and April Flores.

“One of the things we’re responding to is that there’s this notion that certainly is propagated by anti-porn feminists and other people, which is that there is one thing called porn with a capital ‘P,’” Taormino told Salon.

She continued, “And it’s monolithic and we can qualify it in all these different ways and say this is what it looks like and this is what it does. As Constance says, ‘That’s just not true.’ What there is is a whole series of pornographies with a lowercase ‘p,’ and that’s what we have to look at and investigate. There is no one thing, and she even challenges the notion that there is a clear division between mainstream porn and independent porn, or mainstream porn and feminist porn, because there are feminists working within the mainstream porn industry and then there are feminists working independently, and there are non-feminists working independently, and vice versa.”

To check out the full list of Top 10 Queer and Feminist Books, click here.